Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller and His Wife, All Together in Paris

Anyone who sees Wendy Beckett’s “Anaïs Nin: One of Her Lives” without knowing a little about Nin’s affair with Henry Miller and his wife, June, in Paris in the early 1930’s would be hard pressed to identify the period.

As Nin, Angela Christian wears backless, slightly slinky 1920’s-style dresses. David Bishins, as Henry, wearing a fedora in public and a white T-shirt in more private moments, seems to have come from the angry-young-man 1950’s.

Strangely, Alysia Reiner’s June looks like a refugee from the 1970’s in a patterned micromini-dress.

Maybe her brash sexual forwardness would feel more seductive and less common if she looked more like the Depression-era wife she was.

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Angela Christian, left, in the title role; David Bishins; and Alysia Reiner are the principals in a love triangle in Anaïs Nin: One of Her Lives.Credit...Richard Termine

(Ms. Reiner is quite effective, and more appropriately costumed, in her brief appearance as Nin’s mother.) Halcyon Pratt, the costume designer, also designed the elegant, versatile set.

Fortunately for this uneven but largely rewarding production, Ms. Christian, as Nin (1903-77), the French author best known for her erotic diaries, is superb.

Some of the critics who helped make Nin a feminist symbol in the 1960’s have reconsidered her work and found it painfully self-important. Ms. Beckett, an Australian playwright said to be distantly related to Samuel Beckett, supports that conclusion with her dialogue.

When June says, “Henry wants to know if you’re a lesbian,” Anaïs replies, “Tell him I’m a writer.” Ms. Christian, exercising her character’s hard-won dignity, gets away with this. She makes lines like “A woman must find her own language” sound almost profound. And, “Whenever anyone says, ‘You are,’ they mean, ‘I want you to be,’ ’’ rings true, at least momentarily.

Mr. Bishins’s Henry has one fabulously memorable line. When he and Nin first encounter each other, he announces, “Delicacy, meet violence.” Under Ms. Beckett’s direction, Mr. Bishins makes Miller — the author of “Tropic of Cancer,” who is largely regarded as a misogynist these days — appealingly fierce.

Poor June has nothing more interesting to say than “The pursuit of pleasure is my only ambition.”

Rocco Sisto plays Nin’s father and her psychoanalyst, Otto Rank. Nin’s husband at the time never appears. But then the play professes to depict only one of her many realities.